Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Is Evolution the New Litmus Test?

When Scott Walker "punted" on the question of whether he believes in evolution or not when he was on a visit to the UK "polishing his foreign-policy credentials," is it possible that A) he couldn't admit that he didn't believe in evolution, or B) his people had focus-group tested the question and discovered that Walker was in dangerous waters?

We may never know now that Walker has shown that his go-to answer to difficult questions is "I don't know if..." But thanks to a recent poll by Public Policy Polling, we've discovered that 49 percent of Republicans don't believe in evolution. Add in the 13 percent that "don't know," and that's 62 percent of GOPers that don't believe in evolution or don't know.

I suspect that belief in evolution won't be a deal-breaker for the eventual Republican nominee in 2016, but if this is a new litmus test, the occupants of the 2016 clown car are going to be a very funny lot indeed. Will evolution be a required question in the coming debates? If so, holy shit.

On a serious note, with a political party that can make trouble for the nation going forward on issues like climate change or the environment in general, the U.S. is going to face a giant struggle building a responsible consensus for saving the planet.

How many Republicans are more focused on the End of Days than on saving the planet? How many take the presidency of Barack Obama as a sign that the Four Horsemen are upon us? What if those questions are not just spurious attempts to belittle the party that currently controls both the Congress and the Supreme Court but rather statements of likely facts that determine where our country is headed?

Since the Tea Party faction of the Republican Party -- read "the hardcore base" of the party -- came to the forefront of American politics in 2010, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and anti-critical-thinking have reshaped much of our political culture.

About the American Human

The American Human is written by Calvin Ross, a retired teacher who at various points in life has been a musician, woodworker, restaurateur, narrator, English teacher in Japan, novelist, technology journalist, and private tutor to Japanese children here in the U.S.

Happily residing in the wine country of Sonoma County north of San Francisco, Calvin has lived in the Philippines, the Netherlands, and the aforementioned Japan, as well as in Chicago, Colorado, Georgia, and many different towns in California, including, of all places, the Mojave Desert.

Calvin, you may note quickly, is a liberal progressive who doesn't think being called a socialist is all that bad, especially since he sort of would like living in Denmark if it weren't so cold. He blogs because he can.